Andromeda groaned again and opened her eyes.
Judy said to her, “Your hands.”
“We can easily mend them.” The girl’s voice was hardly audible.
“What happened?”
“Something went wrong, that’s all.”
Judy left her and telephoned Dr. Hunter.
From that moment events moved with almost cataclysmic speed. Hunter put a temporary dressing on Andromeda’s hands and tried to persuade her to move into the station’s sick bay, but she refused to leave the computer until she had seen Madeleine Dawnay.
“It will be quicker in the end,” she told them. Although she was suffering from shock, she went sturdily through Dawnay’s papers until she found the section she was looking for. Hunter had given her local shots to ease the pain in her hands, and with these and the bandages she fumbled a good deal, but she pulled out the sheets she wanted and shuffled them across to Dawnay. They were concerned with enzyme production in the D.N.A. formula.
“What do we do with these?” Dawnay looked at them doubtfully.
“Get an isolated tissue formula,” said Andromeda, and took the papers back to the computer. She was weak and pale and could hardly walk. Dawnay, Hunter and Judy watched anxiously as she stood again between the terminals and put out her swathed hands; but this time there was no disaster, and after a little the machine started printing-out.
“It’s an enzyme formula. You can make it up quite easily.” She indicated the printer-paper to Dawnay and then turned to Hunter. “I should like to lie down now, please. The enzyme can be applied to my hands on a medicated base when Professor Dawnay has prepared it, but it should be as soon as possible.”
She was ill for several days, and Hunter dressed her hands with an ointment containing the formula, when Dawnay had made it up. The healing was miraculous: new tissue—soft natural flesh, not the hard tissue of scarring—filled in the wounds in a matter of hours, and formed a fresh layer of pale pink skin across her palms. By the time she recovered from the effects of the electric shocks, her hands were remade.
Hunter, meanwhile, had reported to Geers and Geers had sent for Fleming. The Director, not yet certain of the outcome of the accident, was sick and thin-lipped with worry, his brief season of fellowship gone.
“So you decide to throw it off balance!” He flung the words across his desk at Fleming and pounded his fist on the polished wood. “You don’t consult anyone—you’re too clever. So clever, the machine goes wrong and damn near kills the girl.”
“If you won’t even listen to what happened.” Fleming’s voice rose to match his, but Geers interrupted.
“I know what happened.”
“Were you there? She knew she was going to be punished. She should have had me thrown out, she should have wiped out what I’d put into the computer; but she didn’t—not soon enough. She hesitated and warned me and let me go, then she went and touched the communication terminals—”
“I thought you’d gone,” Geers reminded him.
“Of course I’d gone. I’m telling you what happened inevitably: she let the machine know that she was alive, that it had been given false information, that the source of the information was around and she hadn’t stopped it. So it punished her by giving her a series of electric shocks. It knows how to do that now; it learnt on Christine.”
The Director listened with thinly disguised impatience. “You’re guessing,” he said at the end.
“It’s not guesswork, Geers. It was bound to happen, only I didn’t realise in time.”
“Have you your pass?” Geers looked at him glintingly through his spectacles. “To the computer building.”
Fleming sniffed and rummaged in his pocket. “You can’t fault me on that one. It’s quite in order.”
He handed it across the desk. Geers took it, examined it, and slowly tore it up.
“What’s that in aid of?”
“We can’t afford you, Fleming. Not any more.”
Fleming banged the desk in his turn. “I’m staying on the station.”
“Stay where you like; but your association with the computer is over. I’m sorry.”
Geers felt better with Fleming out of the way, and better still when he heard of Andromeda’s recovery. He got all the facts he could from Dawnay and Hunter about the enzyme, and then got through on his direct line to Whitehall. The reaction was as he thought. He sent for Andromeda and questioned her and seemed well pleased.
Fleming a year or two back would have hit the bottle, but this time he had no appetite even for that. The same compulsion that had held him to the computer tied him to the compound; even though there was nothing he could now do, no part he could have in the project, he remained on the station, solitary and uncertain and given to long walks and lying on his bed. It was deep winter, but calm and grey, as though something dramatic were being withheld.
About a week after the accident—or punishment, as Fleming thought of it—he was returning from a walk on the moors when he saw an enormous and extravagantly shining car outside Geers’s office, and as he passed it a short, square man with a bald head got out.
“Dr. Fleming!” The bald man raised a hand to stop and greet him.
“What are you doing here?”
“I hope you do not mind,” said Kaufmann.
Fleming looked to see who was around. “Get out,” he said.
“Please Herr Doktor, do not be embarrassed.” Kaufmann smiled at him. “I am quite official. A.1 at Lloyds. I do not compromise you.”
“You didn’t compromise Bridger either, I suppose?” Fleming jerked his head towards the main gate. “That’s the exit.”
Kaufmann smiled again, and pulled out his case of cigarillos. “Smoking?”
“Slightly,” Fleming said, “at the edges. I am not interested in anything you have to offer. Try the next door house.”
“I do that.” Kaufmann laughed and stuck a small cigar between his teeth before they closed. “I do just that. I stop you, Herr Doktor, to tell you that I shall not bother you any more. I have other means, much better, much more honest.”
He smiled again, lit his cigar and walked without hesitation into the vestibule of Geers’s office.
Fleming ran over to the security block, but Quadring was out somewhere, and so was Judy. Finally he got hold of Judy on the telephone, but by the time she reached Geers’s office, the Director was just showing Kaufmann out. The two men seemed to be on most cordial terms, and Geers was smoking one of the cigarillos.
“Businesswise,” Kaufmann was saying, “the process is immaterial. We are not curious; it is the result, yes?”
“We deal in results here.” Geers had his number one smile switched on. He held out a hand. “Auf Wiedersehen.”
Judy watched while Kaufmann shook hands and walked back to his car. As the Director turned to go back into his office she said, “Can I speak to you for a minute?”
Geers flicked his smile off. “I’m rather busy.”
“This is important. You know who he is?”
“His name is Kaufmann.”
“Intel.”
“That’s right.” Geers’s fingers itched at the door handle.
“It was Kaufmann whom Dr. Bridger was selling—” Judy started, but Geers cut her short.
“I know all about the Bridger case.”
Behind his voice Judy could hear the car driving away. Somehow it made what she felt seem terribly urgent: she had to batter it into him.
“It was Intel. They were taking secrets...”
Geers edged into his doorway. “They’re not taking secrets from me,” he said haughtily.
“But—” She followed him in uninvited, and found Dawnay waiting quietly in the office. She felt suddenly thrown and mumbled an apology to the older woman.